Here is a very welcome restoration of Michelangelo Antonioni’s bleakly intoxicating 1964 picture about a woman cast mentally adrift in the desolate, ash-blackened landscape of a newly industrialised Italy. Red Desert is like the lingering memory of a dream: whenever you try to reach out and grasp its meanings and images they slip tantalisingly back into the darkness.

You can’t tear your eyes away from Monica Vitti as Giuliana, a russet-haired, almond-eyed young mother and the unhappy survivor of a failed suicide attempt. Harried by existential doubts, she finds a kindred spirit in Richard Harris’s anchorless industrialist and together, they embark on an affair of sorts against a backdrop of what Andrew Sarris called “the architecture of anxiety”: smoke-belching factories, mist-cloaked shacks and radio masts lined up on a treeless plain like enormous, skeletal stormtroopers.

Antonioni’s bold, modernist angles and thrillingly innovative use of colour (he painted trees and grass to tone with the industrial landscape) make every frame a work of art: an achievement made all the more extraordinary considering this was his first colour film. Almost half a century on, Red Desert remains a film of rare beauty and brooding erotic intensity.

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Before the thrills of The Guns of Navarone and the spills of Cape Fear, J Lee Thompson directed this modest tale of a calcified marriage in 1950s London, preempting the rise of social realism and kitchen sink drama. This restoration sees it return to cinemas for the first time since its 1957 release.

Thompson opens evocatively on a postwar London housing estate; clean, quiet and geometrically ordered. Inside one of the flats is our titular woman: not some silk-kimonoed temptress but Amy Preston (Yvonne Mitchell), an ordinary housewife in a cotton robe, locked in perpetual combat with the ironing and washing-up.

Her scattiness causes much eye-rolling in her husband (Anthony Quayle) and teenage son (Andrew Ray). “It doesn’t matter so long as we’re happy,” she says, but of course, deep down, they aren’t: for Amy, life’s promise has given way to an endless cycle of chores, and her quietly disenchanted spouse is having an affair with his secretary (Sylvia Syms).

Ted Willis’s nimble, even-handed screenplay refuses to pick sides, and Thompson often shoots through the bars of a bedstead, framing domestic life as a snug prison. It’s utterly compelling, both as a historical document and as heartbreakingly plausible drama.